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prajwal.panzade[at]outlook.com | prajwal.panzade[at]ieee.org
I'm a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Cybersecurity at Old Dominion University (ODU). I earned my PhD in Computer Science from Georgia State University (GSU), USA in August 2024, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Zhipeng Cai and Prof. Daniel Takabi.
My research focuses on Privacy-preserving Machine Learning. I enjoy working on problems related to security and privacy in machine learning. For the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to work on interesting research projects supported by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation, intersecting lattice-based cryptography, vision transformers, and large language models (LLMs).
Before beginning my PhD studies at GSU, I worked as a lecturer at the National Institute of Technology in India, shortly after completing my master’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology.
When I am not researching or spending time with my family, I spend my free time playing drums, traveling, and reading books.
Activities and updates
Activities and updates
02/27/25 Our paper "BlindTuner: On Enhancement of Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning of Transformers based on Homomorphic Encryption" got accepted to appear in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal
12/20/24 Dr. Javad Rafiei Asl (ODU), Dr. Shongtong Zhang (UVA) and I got $60K from CCI for "Enhancing the Security of LLMs against Persuasion-based Jailbreak Attacks in Multi-Turn Dialogues"
09/25/24 Started my new position at ODU
08/07/24 Officially earned my doctorate from GSU
07/12/24 Successfully defended my PhD dissertation
05/23/24 Organized and attended IEEE S&P'24 in the beautiful city of San Fransisco, CA
03/15/24 Our paper "RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning" has been accepted to the NAACL 2024 Findings.
02/06/24 Received a travel grant to attend PPAI @ AAAI 2024
01/23/24 The US Congress has passed the bill mentioning the Indian Institute of Technology (my alma mater). It highlights - "honor the technology, scientific, and economic innovation attributable to graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology"
12/22/23 Our paper "I can't see it but I can fine-tune it" got accepted at PPAI-24 @AAAI-24.
12/ 15/ 23 Our paper MedBlindTuner got accepted at W3PHIAI-24 @AAAI-24.
10/20/23 Our paper on "Privacy-preserving Machine Learning using Functional Encryption: Opportunities and Challenges" got accepted in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IF: 10.6)
10/11/23 Successfully defended the doctoral proposal; I'm officially a PhD candidate now
09/01/23 I'm once again honored to serve as a web chair of the prestigious IEEE S&P 2024
08/22/23 Got selected to serve on Artifact Review Committee of PETS'24
06/20/23 Got selected as an Artifact Evaluation Committee member of NDSS'24
06/15/23 Got invited as a TPC member for Workshop on Cyberspace Security and Artificial Intelligence (CAI-2023) @ IEEE TrustComm'23
05/27/23 Enjoyed IEEE S&P'23 at San Fransisco
05/22/23 Our proposal on "A Design Study of Problem-centered Instruction (PCI) for Private Artificial Intelligence (AI) Curriculum Development" got accepted at the AECT International Convention, Orlando, FL.
04/26/23 Had a great time presenting our work on FENet at the ACM IWSPA @CODASPY'23.
04/21/23 Our poster "Packing-aware Pruning for Efficient Private Inference based on Homomorphic Encryption" got accepted for oral presentation at IEEE S&P 2023.
02/08/23 Our paper "FENet: Privacy-preserving Neural Network Training with Functional Encryption" got accepted in the 9th ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy Analytics co-located with ACM CODASPY 2023.
06/07/22 Padmavathi Iyer and I volunteered for SACMAT'22
05/10/22 I'm invited to serve as a web chair for IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2023
04/20/22 Our poster "Privacy-preserving Neural Network with Functional Encryption" got accepted for oral presentation at IEEE S & P 2022 (Oakland)
04/17/22 Received a travel grant ($1300) to attend the most awaited IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2022 that will be held at San Fransisco.
02/11/22 Attended a workshop on Private AI by the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation, Chicago
11/17/21 Our paper "Towards Faster Functional Encryption for Privacy-preserving Machine Learning" got accepted in IEEE TPS 2021
02/02/21 Successfully passed PhD qualifier exam
05/20/21 Received a grant to attend IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2021
01/15/21 Won 5th prize in Crypto Hackathon organized by FENTEC GROUP under EU H2020 project in conjunction with International Association for Cryptologic Research Real World Crypto Symposium 2021
11/13/20 Received a grant for and attended ACM CCS 2020
07/23/20 Attended Microsoft's Frontiers in Machine Learning Conference
06/17/20 The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security have designated our center at @Georgia State University as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research
06/06/20 Got selected for and attended training on Designing a Data Science Solution on Azure organized by Microsoft Research Redmond
5/21/20 Attended 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
4/29/20 Received a grant to attend the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020
Publications:
Publications:
Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi and Zhipeng Cai. BlindTuner: On Enhancement of Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning of Transformers based on Homomorphic Encryption. IEEE Internet of Things Journal 2025 (Accepted).
Golnoush Haddadian, Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi, Min Kim. Problem-Centered Post-Secondary Computer Science Education: A Study of the Private Artificial Intelligence Curriculum. International Journal of Technology in Education 2025 (Accepted).
Parsa Ghazvinian, Robert Podschwadt, Prajwal Panzade, Mohammad H Rafiei, Daniel Takabi. MOFHEI: Model Optimizing Framework for Fast and Efficient Homomorphically Encrypted Neural Network Inference. IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy, and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications 2024.
Javad Rafiei Asl, Prajwal Panzade, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi, Zhipeng Cai. RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning. Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL Findings) 2024 (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Golnoush Haddadian, Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi, Min Kim. Evaluating private artificial intelligence (AI) curriculum in computer science (CS) education: Insights for advancing student-centered CS learning. The 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences/Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ICLS/CSCL-2024) (supported by NSF).
Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi and Zhipeng Cai. I Can’t See It But I Can Fine-tune It: On Encrypted Fine-tuning of Transformers using Fully Homomorphic Encryption. PPAI-24@The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024 (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi and Zhipeng Cai. MedBlindTuner: Towards Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning on Biomedical Images with Transformers and Fully Homomorphic Encryption. W3PHIAI-24@The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024 (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Prajwal Panzade, Daniel Takabi and Zhipeng Cai. Privacy-preserving Machine Learning using Functional Encryption: Opportunities and Challenges. IEEE Internet of Things Journal 2023 (IF: 10.6) (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Haddadian G, Takabi D, Panzade P, Kim M. A Design Study of Problem-centered Instruction (PCI) for Private Artificial Intelligence (AI) Curriculum Development. Association for Educational Communications and Technology Conference 2023 (supported by NSF).
Prajwal Panzade and Daniel Takabi. FENet: Privacy-preserving Neural Network Training with Functional Encryption. IWSPA @ ACM CODASPY 2023 (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Parsa Ghazvinian, Robert Podschwadt, Prajwal Panzade, Mohammad H Rafiei, Daniel Takabi. Poster: Packing-aware Pruning for Efficient Private Inference based on Homomorphic Encryption. IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2023
Prajwal Panzade and Daniel Takabi. Poster: Privacy-preserving Neural Network with Functional Encryption. IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2022
Prajwal Panzade and Daniel Takabi. SoK: Privacy Preserving Machine Learning using Functional Encryption: Opportunities and Challenges.
Prajwal Panzade and Daniel Takabi. Towards Faster Functional Encryption for Privacy-preserving Machine Learning. IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy, and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications, Dec 2021. IEEE (supported by Microsoft and NSF).
Prakash CS, Panzade PP, Maheshkar S, Om H. Detection of Copy-move forgery using AKAZE and SIFT keypoint extraction. Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications. May 2019. Springer.
Panzade PP, Prakash CS, Maheshkar S. Copy-move forgery detection by using HSV preprocessing and keypoint extraction. In Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing (PDGC), 2016 Fourth International Conference on 2016 Dec 22 (pp. 264-269). IEEE.
Geethika S, Sai Sree I, Pranathi A, Prajwal P, Advertisements and Multimedia Recommendation based on Age, Gender and Emotion (AMRAGE). ICCCMLA 2019: International Conference on Cybernetics, Cognition, and Machine Learning Applications. Springer.
Professional Services:
Professional Services:
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2026) - Program Committee/Editorial Board
AAAI Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence (PPAI-2025) - Program Committee
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2025) - Program Committee/Editorial Board
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025 - Publicity Chair
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 - Artifact Evaluation Committee
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 - Posters Program Committee
IEEE Transactions on Computers - Reviewer
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security - Reviewer
IEEE Internet of Things Journal - Reviewer
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security - Reviewer
ACM Computing Surveys - Reviewer
CAI @ IEEE TrustComm 2023 -Technical Program Committee
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 (IEEE S&P) - Web Chair
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 - Artifact Evaluation Committee
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2024 (PETS) - Artifact Review Committee
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2023 (IEEE S&P) - Web Chair
Member of the Board of Studies at Government College of Engineering Amravati
Honors and Awards:
Honors and Awards:
Research Grant from CCI - $60K
Award for Contribution to the Organizing Committee of IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2024 ($1000)
Travel Grant Award - PPAI-24@The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024 ($500)
Travel Grant Award - IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2022 ($1300)
5th place - World-level Crypto Hackathon organized by FENTEC GROUP under the EU H2020 project in conjunction with the International Association for Cryptologic Research Real World Crypto Symposium 2021 ($250)
Registration Grant Award- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2021
Registration Grant Award- ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2020
Registration Grant Award- 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020
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